


This Fearful Symmetry

by acquaintedwithvice



Category: The Man in the High Castle (TV)
Genre: Captivity, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Manipulation, Power Imbalance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2019-10-21 22:58:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17651420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acquaintedwithvice/pseuds/acquaintedwithvice
Summary: "You're very good, in this role you play. The bird with the broken wing."- Obergruppenführer John Smith, GNR"We all have flaws, every one of us, every single one of us. It makes us who we are."- Juliana Crain, no fixed allegiancePlaylist: https://8tracks.com/virtueofvice/this-fearful-symmetry





	1. Grey

**Author's Note:**

> "Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil."   
> \- Friedrich Nietzsche

If she had been asked to describe the Reich in one word, one syllable, it would have been _grey._ Uniform, unvarying, bleak and imposing. Without feeling or sympathy, lacking in humanity. Stark, implacable grey. Like the walls, the grainy sealed cement of the floor with its built-in drain, the electrified cuffs and the brushed stainless table they were mounted to. Grey, in the swinging shadows like hanged men on the painted cement-block walls of the interrogation room. Grey in the inarticulate muffled screams, in a voice that was no longer her own.

_Would you like to tell me now?_

She could not recall the moment of breaking, could not feel the burning shame of truths spoken on her bloody, cracked lips - but it must have come, that moment, for all at once it seemed the world stopped turning. The hateful bonds, removed; and then a long stretch of echoing silence as she was hauled, unresisting, down a dark corridor and tossed unceremoniously onto a bunk. It was hard, a thin lumpy mattress and a threadbare wool blanket over a slab of steel like a morgue table - she curled into herself, shut her eyes against the dim but insistent glow, and was instantly asleep. There she remained, in a sterile half-light, for untold days.

_The bird with the broken wing._

Thought was grey, as well - the alchemical cocoon of sleep, so long denied and then granted in abundance, blended the white of innocent memory and blameless empty days with the inky dark terror of more recent recollections. It swirled in drifting plumes, without beginning or end, through the haze of her subconscious; painting over the monotony of her featureless hours and weeks, the long drugged silences. The faintly humming fluorescent, caged in its grate of steel, illumined her pale face and the dark circles under her eyes ceaselessly. She saw no one and nothing, counting the perforated paper tiles on the ceiling in the silence of slowly encroaching madness. Time lost its meaning, a scattering of broken clockwork against the drab nothing of her surroundings. No response came when she cried out, cursed, muttered to herself. She forgot the sound of her own voice. She measured the room in paces, five by ten, with a small closet at one end that contained a polished plate of steel - for self reflection, not vanity - and, likewise steel, a wall-mounted toilet... The only trace of human amenities she had yet seen. The camera mounted in the upper right corner of the room was a constantly staring eye, black and unblinking - at times, lying in her bunk, mind studiously empty, she found herself staring back.

She slept, for hours, days at a time; her long dark hair lay tousled with sweat and restless dreams and her own blood on the thin worn mattress. Her meals were simple but nutritive, slid beneath the heavily bolted door on a tray frequently enough that she felt no true pangs of hunger. No utensils, no waste. No mental stimulation of any kind was offered - the risk of escape neutralized not through brutality but through boredom. When she was not eating, sleeping, or staring into the abyss, she practiced katas -the tenets and rhythm of Aikido granting her some solace, the illusion of purpose. The movement kept her muscles from atrophy, but little more. She had expected some resistance; a beating, perhaps, for engaging in such decidedly Japanese behaviors whilst on German soil. None was forthcoming, and so she continued.

She considered sabotage, insurrection - imagined crouching by the hole in the door, waiting for an unsuspecting hand to reach through, catching it in a white-knuckled grip, cruelly tight. _Biting the hand that feeds._ Fear of retaliation made her hesitate, shamed by her own weakness. Worse than the lingering memory of pain was the concept of interminable silence - to be wholly abandoned, no trays, nothing. So she continued. Food, rest and exercise contrived to restore the appearance of humanity to her gaunt features - the ribs that had become obvious during her imprisonment, the cords in her neck; softened once more under a supple layer of flesh.

Sometimes, the sliding panel that admitted the food would slide open to reveal a tall, sturdy plastic tumbler of tepid but clear water that tasted faintly of minerals. Standing on a flat metal tray, it was accompanied by a little pleated paper cup bearing several colorful capsules. On one of the first nights of her seemingly interminable confinement, she was desperately thirsty, and after sniffing the liquid suspiciously - though for what, she couldn't say - she downed it with aplomb. The pills, however, she rejected out of hand, casting them down the steel toilet and flushing with a defiant glance over her shoulder at the camera. The next night, the pills had been borne in by an unsmiling nurse in a smart white uniform, who held the little cup out insistently. Juliana was startled by the sudden appearance of another human being, by the brightness of her white uniform and glaring red armband. When she again refused the drugs, a uniformed SS officer stepped into the cell, impassively drawing his weapon and pressing it to her temple. She swallowed them that night, and every night thereafter, hours and weeks melting away into an empty, echoing fog.

One day, she was startled awake by the heavy clunk, the low dull screech of metal long disused sliding against itself. Her eyes automatically turned to the floor, to seek out the tray that would certainly be there. There was no tray. The door - shut so long she had almost forgotten its function - stood open, two uniformed officers standing in the wide void it left. The bold red, stark white crossing the deep black of their uniforms hurt her eyes, and she blinked, raising a hand as if to defend herself. Without speaking, the two men gripped her upper arms and dragged her to her feet, hauling her down a corridor previously unnoticed and unexplored.

She was shoved forcefully into a chilly, echoing room, the door bolted behind her. Grim-faced, wearing the uniform of an SS Helferin and the expression of someone who would rather be elsewhere; a sturdy blonde woman stepped forward and gestured at her. When Juliana did not immediately respond, too bewildered by the abrupt change in surroundings and the drugs in her system, the Helferin with firm and ungentle hands proceeded to strip her. Pale eyes wide, Juliana cried out, stumbled back; but her garments were thin and ragged from months of abuse and tore away easily beneath the assault. Scowling, as if dealing with an unruly child, the Helferin shoved her into a tiled alcove and pointed at the pipe running along the wall, the flat perforated faucet overhead. As if on cue, the shower activated, and Juliana flinched away with a gasp, expecting scalding acid or poison gas. When nothing but water emerged - near-scalding, but clear and cleansing - she tentatively stepped forward again and raised her arms, a girl in the rain. For a moment, closing her eyes as the steady, smarting stream washed away the grime and dust of long captivity, she could have almost imagined she was elsewhere.

No soap was offered, but she did the best she could, digging long fingers into her scalp and scrubbing vigorously beneath the stream, scraping her skin with her fingernails till it glowed red beneath the hot water. The experience was a paltry thing, but lent undue weight through its long denial; and was over too soon. The Helferin shoved a jumpsuit at her, grey-blue cotton, worn but neatly stitched and freshly laundered, with the remnants of a number still stamped over the breast. Juliana's fingertips hovered over the thing, half the horror of remembrance, half yearning for something clean and soft against her skin... The Helferin's expression had brooked no argument, and so she dressed, her eyes trained down. A pair of soft canvas slippers were handed to her and she took them, slipping them on over damp feet and padding obediently down the echoing hallway. The shower had returned some of her faculties, and she glanced around, eyes sliding from side to side beneath lowered lashes, seeking an exit, a weapon, anything that would aid her in regaining her freedom or at least ending the monotony of imprisonment. There was nothing. There had always been nothing.

The Helferin passed her off to the two men that had retrieved her from her cell, and Juliana slumped against their relentless grasp, against the cold steel of cuffs that encircled her wrists and made her shoulders tense in expectation of pain. The momentary flash of spirit that had animated her drained away. Now clean, she would probably be returned to her cell, there to await more torture, or more nothing. Or perhaps they had ordered her execution, and the shower and clean clothes were a last nod to her humanity. She lacked the energy to contemplate matters further away than the tips of her new canvas slippers on the spotless concrete floor. Her head hung low in defeat, her frame loose and unaccommodating in the grip of her captors. Still they said nothing - were it not for their forceful treatment of her, she would have imagined herself a ghost, moving unseen through their world, unworthy of even a word. The click of jackboots on the floor was a metronomic background noise, devoid of meaning. Polished black leather crossed into her field of vision, and reluctantly she dragged her eyes upward, gaze sliding over pleats pressed into dark wool, polished silver buttons, the crisscross of countless embellishments against deep, unrelenting black.

"Well, Miss Crain. We meet again."

Hazel, hooded in the half-light beneath the brim of a cap bearing the Reichsadler, his eyes met hers. She had thought, in the days and weeks before, that she had been emptied of feeling - drained like an egg, which has been pricked with a pin and had its contents blown away, leaving only the pretty shell as a collector's piece. She had been wrong. _Danger._ The animal instinct, the desire to survive that had guided her so well for so long, rose up and threatened to break free in a falcon's shriek. Here was terror, loathing, the dread decaying ghost of hope. For the first time since the cell had opened and spat her out, she fought against her bonds, against the soldiers holding her; stumbling backwards against an immovable object in her haste to escape an unstoppable force.

"No," her voice was rusty from disuse, a crow's caw. "No!"

"Take her." His voice was pleasant, almost bored, and the last thing she saw was his curious smirk before they dragged the burlap sack over her head and bore her, struggling, away.


	2. Blue

Cerulean suffocated him. The vast endless blue of the sea, of the innocent winter sky, the stiff cold lips of a corpse.

_Would you like to tell me now?_

He woke slowly, the rich linens and cool empty goosedown pillows as foreign to his senses as an alien planet. It was her eyes that stayed with him, the piercing blameless blue, brighter than an alpine sky. Helen’s eyes had been a similar shade - Aryan blue; intelligent, kind eyes. But Helen was gone, his children gone… Everything he had ever valued or cared about, gone.

Instead he woke with his heart in his throat; disoriented, chest working like a bellows as he banished the image of those blue eyes staring at him - baleful, accusatory. _I can only imagine how that must weigh on you._

The machine of the Reich excelled at destruction - of cities, of subversion, of the human spirit… And so he was unsurprised, but perhaps a little disappointed, to see her fire burned to ash. Her eyes had been empty at their last meeting, an echoing mirror of the horror he knew he had become; with nary a whisper of her former self - of that cool blue flame that scarcely wavered and would cut through a man like so much scrap metal. He remembered the steely azure of her eyes when she was first brought in, so unafraid, so bold. So different from the animal in a cage he had seen yesterday. He rolled his shoulders, shaking off the tension and shame, dispelling the image as he rose from his cold bachelor’s bed. Some things - horses, silence - must be broken before they are useful.

 _Juliana Crain._ Fierce, and clever; and now, by his command, a shadow of her former self - a faint glow breaking through the shattered windows of her soul, of the hollow shell she had become. She represented an outrageous differential, a wildcard - and that enigma, he imagined, was the problem. The reason why, every morning since he’d seen her last, he woke confused, troubled… And so hard it made him gasp. 

Silence ruled the Manhattan penthouse his new position had afforded him - the halls and empty rooms, modern yet opulent; now stark and echoing, as devoid of life as he was. The maid had been dismissed some time ago, an unfortunate scapegoat bearing the blame for Helen’s betrayal - blame that by rights was his to bear. The chill of late November crept into the apartment, painting frost on the tall panes of glass, turning the hard herringbone wood and ceramic tile to ice. The walls of the master bathroom were an inoffensive periwinkle, but the shade grated on him till he stepped beneath the scalding shower and shut his eyes, tilting his head back beneath the stream, hoping perhaps to dissolve and be washed away - removed from the face of the earth like the stain he was. His erection lingered, shaft throbbing insistently in spite of all efforts to empty his mind, to banish that steady, penetrating blue. Grimacing, he spun the polished brass knob roughly to the left; taut muscle clenched in anticipation of misery as the heat departed and the water turned punishingly cold.

*   *   *   *   *

She would never be sure, later, if it was a nightmare, the physical examination. She could recall it only in dreams, her waking mind shying away from the chill room, the invasive, probing touch - the gut-twisting thrill of humiliation, making her heart race and her eyes burn; throat tight and jaw clenched. Trembling beneath the harsh white luminance of unshielded fluorescents, gaze perpetually downcast. Cold, clinical hands and eyes measuring the length of her limbs, the circumference of her head, waist, hips; the pliability and texture of her skin, her hair. In the Reich, a woman was only as valuable as her anatomy could make her.

And through it all, the hooded hazel eyes watching from the shadows at the edge of the room, beyond the glare of the lights overhead, black wool and leather impenetrable, untouchable. Staring beryl, nigh invisible save for their animal glimmer. She imagined - must’ve - the leather-clad hand tracing her quivering flank; the dully gleaming onyx so dark it was almost cobalt against the shivering bone white of her skin.

Her spine went rigid as she sat up abruptly, eyes snapping open, aquamarine staring wildly around at her surroundings. Bland, uninviting, sterile - at first she imagined herself back in her cell, so little had changed. Had all of it - had _he_ been a dream? It seemed possible - the stuff of nightmares followed the Reichsmarschall wherever he went. But the fabric bunched beneath her fingers as she wrapped her arms around her thin shoulders was soft and worn, the dull smoky indigo cotton of the jumpsuit she had been given. The narrow cot was much the same, but the room was smaller, darker - the walls painted a faded, unfriendly cyan, the floors bland off-white linoleum. The door was just a door, not a steel-plated bulwark. She rose, crossed the room, tried the knob. It refused to yield, which was expected; but a moment later turned of its own accord as the door swung open. She leapt back, fingertips flying to her mouth as if she had been burned; as if she were a beaten child, caught attempting escape.

Two uniformed men stood in the doorway, appearing supremely uninterested in both her person and her behavior. The slightly taller of the two, bearing more pins on his lapel and an expression of weary command, nodded in her direction. There was something familiar in his incurious gaze, the surprisingly soft and youthful contours of his face. As the other soldier stepped forward, gripping her arm and pulling her from the room, recognition dawned - _Erich Raeder._ The Reichsmarschall’s personal assistant, executor of his will. As they started down the dim corridor, her inquiries and entreaties died on her tongue - useless to speak them, to such unhearing ears. Better to save her basket of sweets for the wolf she was sure awaited her, at the end of this shadowed path.

At the end of the hall, before a set of steel double doors painted a dark, utilitarian navy, she was shoved without preamble into what had once been a small unused storeroom, but now held an SS Helferin - identical in form and expression to the one from the prison, and equally unimpressed. The unsmiling woman held out a dress - pale cornflower blue, the powdery uncertain hue of an empty nursery. On the bench behind her were stockings - an unflattering nude, darker than her natural skin tone, of a cheap nylon that she knew would be rough and irritating. Underthings were there as well, virginal white, and similarly constructed. Plain black pumps rested on the floor, the heel low enough to suit a schoolmarm or church organist. But of course, there were no churches in the Reich.

She dressed promptly, aware of what the repercussions would be for the intolerable crime of dalliance. The dress was ill-fitting - too loose in the waist, too tight in the bust and hips, of an inexpensive wool blend that nevertheless failed to ward off the chill. The undergarments - pantyhose, back-clasping brassiere, high-waisted panties edged with itchy nylon lace - rubbed against her skin unpleasantly. Nevertheless, as she stepped into the unflattering pumps, her spine straightened of its own accord, and she began to feel like herself again. She raised her head, meeting the eyes of another human being squarely for the first time in what felt like years, and spoke. “Where are you taking me?”

“To see him, of course.” The Helferin answered without inflection. She handed over a basic black plastic comb of the type that tears at long hair painfully, and Juliana reached out to take it, her hand hesitating at the older woman’s words.

“Who?” Though the answer was already there, rising in her throat like bile, or the manic rush of speechless excitement.

“The Reichsmarschall.”


	3. Gold

Her feet ached already, unaccustomed to the sensation of high heels, to the rapid pace at which she was hurried along. The warren of dark corridors and dull uninteresting service doors suddenly gave way to high vaulted ceilings and a stabbing glare that, squinting, she recognized as sunlight. Eyes watering, her vision cleared gradually until, with a sinking despair, she recognized her surroundings. The headquarters of the Greater Nazi Reich - the pride of a new New York, a living city reborn as a quietly unresistant copy of itself, vacillating like an alternating current between biddable compliance and feverish nationalism. The building itself was monumental in the way of all German architecture - tall, sturdily built, imposing without effort. The outer walls were concrete, stark and unyielding against the blindingly bright midday sky, which she could only glimpse through the high windows. Inside, the walls and floor - the parts her downturned gaze took in - were comprised of massive slabs of black marble, threaded sparsely with veins of white and gold. The echoing clack of many feet - pumps, polished oxfords, jackboots - rattled around in her skull as she was herded, almost carried, through the halls.

After a seemingly interminable journey, down hallways full of curious eyes, up staircases both grand and mundane, she found herself before a set of warmly stained, heavy oak doors, looming like wary sentinels only inches beyond her nose. She halted, raised her head and instinctively pulled away, straining against the tight hand on her upper arm. _He_ was behind the door, she knew; eyed the malignant gleam of the brass handle, showing her a distorted reflection of herself as she stepped back, gripped the wrist of the hand that held her and twisted. The soldier cried out, faltered; she turned to break free and escape - and long fingers wrapped around the back of her neck, shoving her against the door, the shock of pain reverberating through her skull as her cheekbone and jaw were slammed hard into the wood. She bit her tongue and bright lemon-yellow sparks erupted behind her eyes at the taste of blood, the copper-and-salt refusal to cry out.

“Come in,” she heard him invite blandly, as if an associate had politely knocked upon the door instead of shoving her face into it; as if it wasn’t his faithful hound obeying his commands, dragging in a broken bird to garner his praise. All her training, all she had survived thus far, railed against the confining hand, the uniformed Sturmbannführer carrying out his master’s dark work. But before she could resist further, before she could bring the weight of her fury to bear against exhaustion and terror and the sedatives lingering like lead weights in her blood, the door was open.

He stood before his desk, in uniform; brimmed cap discarded on a side table, as if he himself had only just arrived. The regalia, which had left a brand in her memory like the image of of a crime scene, stood out against the warm earth tones of the office like a black streak of ash on the face of a cadaver. Gold braids, glittering insignia - the marks of his allegiance, of all he had done. Gritting her teeth so hard she thought her jaw would crack with the pressure, Juliana allowed herself to be pushed forward, into the slant of buttery light pouring through the windows - into the shadow of his scrutiny.

“Miss Crain.” He greeted softly; a wolf snarling from the darkness of its den, gamboge eyes glowing. She blinked, and he was just a man. Though he still towered over her modest one hundred seventy centimeters, he was not as tall as she remembered - not the looming nightmare figure from her dark imaginings, impossibly elevated, all sharp angles and sinister intent. He turned, setting down the file in his hand, and she caught the trenchant line of his profile, the dull dark gleam of his revolver. Sinister intent, perhaps, remained.

“Obergruppenführer.” She replied - a reflex, a knee-jerk reaction instilled when she had been a defector; a proper, faithful citizen of the Reich. Respect for his authority, for the position the stylized eagles and crosses on his lapel represented. For his power over her.

“It’s _Reichsmarschall_ now.” The Sturmbannführer informed her, in a tone politely bland, as if reporting a change in the lunch menu. As if he had not smashed her face into a panel of hardwood only moments before. She twitched, glancing over her shoulder at the other man, watched him withdraw to stand, expressionless but watchful, by the door. As her gaze returned to him Smith shrugged self-deprecatingly, and smirked; as if amused by the title, and her ignorance of it. Or perhaps it was her apparent deference that amused him.

_You’ve been busy since I last saw you._

“I’m not going to tell you _anything._ “ She informed him abruptly, surprised by the venom in her words. She hadn’t realized there was any bite left in her. He seemed surprised as well, but it was tempered with that same knowing glint in his eyes, the careless way he crossed the room, straightening his cuff. He did not deign even to look at her until he drew abreast, until the difference in their heights was magnified, underscored by the depth in his dark hazel eyes as he stared down at her. She stepped back, as if drawing away from a rattlesnake which had suddenly reared up from the grass, the primitive instinct to flee from danger. He allowed her retreat, seemed to find it entertaining.

“Oh, you’ve already told me _everything._ ” He shrugged, turning away to pour a splash of honey-colored liquid from a crystal decanter, warm and gleaming invitingly through the prism of the glass. As the Reichsmarschall turned his back on her, the Nazi guard dog observing the meeting from his position by the door shifted uncomfortably. Juliana’s eyes flickered to him, taking in his threatened and uneasy posture, and almost scoffed at his naivety. Everyone knew John Smith had eyes in the back of his head. “Not in words of course, you were quite stubborn.” He eyed her as a father eyes a naughty but thoroughly chastised child; and continued, tone softer. “But you were spotted. In the Reich, someone is always watching. After that, it was only a matter of tracing your movements back to their inevitable terminus.” He waved an elegant hand, as if scattering the ashes of all her comrades, her friends; giving them back to the wind. “C’est la vie.”

“Monster.” She spat, starting recklessly forward, forgetting herself, her circumstances - forgetting _him_ , and all he was capable of. Without bothering to turn, his hand fell to the butt of his gun, the other raising his glass to his lips.

“I am,” he murmured into his whiskey, and brought her up short. Somehow, though he had never evinced a great concern for the opinion of others, she had expected him to disagree.

“If you knew all along, then why bother? The torture, the isolation… What was it all for?” Her voice was raw, hands clenched into fists at her sides so tightly that her nails cut little crescents into her palms, paying in blood for her restraint - her _fear_. Tears started in her eyes, tears of frustration, of disbelief at his calculated cruelty… He had welcomed her into his home as a friend, a useful ally; into the bosom of his family. He had confined her to a cell, for months, apparently for pleasure. The dichotomy refused to resolve itself.

“It was necessary to educate you in compliance,” he replied offhand, seemingly unfazed by her acrimony. An ugly bruise was rising on her cheek, mustard yellow beneath the translucent pale gold of her skin, and he cast his gaze to Raeder. The man would have to be disciplined. Glass in hand, he took a seat in one of the well-upholstered armchairs scattered around the office, crossing one leg over the other, ankle to knee. Extending a hand, palm up, he indicated the chair opposite himself, inviting her to sit. She glared at him for a long moment, rage a choking ball in her throat. Nostrils flaring as she uncurled her fists; she swallowed hard, relaxed her posture, and sat. The only way to kill a rattlesnake is to get close enough to touch it.

“I wasn’t aware that the Reich required corpses to be so well-educated.” She retorted scathingly. “Why waste resources on the reconditioning of a political prisoner headed for the firing squad?” She could almost taste the gunpowder and bitter metal on the air, her head full of rifle reports in the halcyon glimmer of a cold dawn.

He tilted his head, a slow smile that stopped at his lips, like a secret - a Roman statue, refined features severe and edged in mystery, graven in black and ivory and gold. “Now what would have given you that idea? Waste not, want not, Miss Crain.” Her eyes widened and she turned pale at his words, and he savored it for a moment before continuing, allowing himself to indulge in the taste of her fear like a reptile tasting warm blood on the air. “You will be working for me. You will be a tool, a weapon; in my hand. Your purpose is not to question but to obey. The Russians have their sparrows; and now, I have you.”

“And if I say no?”

“This is the price of your life, Miss Crain. There are no useless things in the Reich.” He gazed at her patiently, as if waiting for her to make her decision - as if she had any options left to consider. She met his stare after a moment of uncomfortable avoidance, magnetized by the inscrutable gaze. Calm, cool; but with flecks of amber at the edges of the iris, lending an unexpected warmth - the illusion of humanity. “Of course, I could always arrange for that firing squad.”

She said nothing, the taste of metal in her mouth heavy and voiceless.

Taking her silence as assent, he continued. “Your role is simple - you will act as my housekeeper, and as my secretary. You will accompany me, morning and night, and when I require it, you will attend state gatherings as my… associate… and garner information from the targets I assign you.”

She swallowed, fought against the instinct to run, to hide - to curl into herself and shut her eyes, to beg for the safety of a cell. Instead, she met his gaze staunchly, determined to keep her tone even. “And what would compel me to comply with this plan?”

He raised an eyebrow - not alarmed, merely curious. “Your life isn’t worth your compliance?”

“Not this life… Not as your _puppet_.” The word dripped with acid, with a disdain she did not truly feel - contempt cannot exist side by side with dread.

He shrugged, looked away into the middle distance, feigning deep contemplation. “Then what about a life of freedom? A fresh start, in the neutral zone? Or beyond.” Voice like worn velvet, rough but enticing nonetheless.

“What’s beyond?” She inquired, as if she did not know. Probing, attempting to gauge what, if anything, _he_ knew.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Miss Crain.” He sipped his whiskey, seemed almost wistful. There was a distance in his eyes that promised intrigue, _escape._ Ridiculous, of course, to think she could have gleaned any information from this, the master of reticence.

“That’s impossible. You can’t promise that.” _And yet… what if?_

“The Reich’s territory, our resources, are growing every day, Miss Crain. Are you willing to gamble your life, your freedom, on the off chance that I’m lying?” He leaned closer, the scent of whiskey and cigarettes and clean wool - a combination she associated with peril. The warmth of him, palpable even across the space between, was both magnetic and repellant… Pulling her apart atom by atom, straining towards opposite poles - good and evil, light and dark, desire and terror. “Have you ever known me to be a man who does not keep his promises?”

“What makes you think you can trust me?” She whispered, eyes wide and still, as if caught in a serpent’s hypnotic gaze.

“What makes you think I do?” He smiled; unconcerned, almost lazy. The expression was easy to imagine in another setting, and her mind unhelpfully supplied it - the texture of smooth linen, cool to the touch; the sunny glow of midmorning bleeding through sheer curtains, highlighting tousled hair and warm skin. How was it she had heard him described? _Dreadfully handsome._ She blinked, curled her hands once more into fists, a reminder to _fight._

Shifting, snapping the tension like a silken gold thread, he set down his glass and withdrew a polished brass pocketwatch, glancing at it with the slightest of furrows between his brows. “I’m afraid I need your answer pretty much immediately, Miss Crain. I have other matters to attend to today. So, what will it be?” He looked up at her once again, putting away the watch, folding his hands in his lap in a threadbare mimicry of benevolence - of _harmlessness._ They both knew better.

Juliana studied her own hands - pale from months without sunlight, nails short and cracked from malnutrition, from anxious fidgeting. She bit her lip, took a breath to steady herself. The only way to kill a rattlesnake is to get close enough to touch it. She lifted her gaze to his - good and evil, light and dark, desire and terror. “I consent.”

“Excellent.”


End file.
